Friday, November 03, 2006

Fun with propaganda

I'm not sure what to make of the first poster (see below). Like my brother said, "He looks hardcore." At first I thought this was a bit of advertising, and the Mr. Peanut depicted was the advertising logo. I thought he had cast aside his monocle and top hat and gone out to fight (and although he's wearing a WWI helmet, this is a WWII poster). But then the bottom of the poster says "United States Department of Agriculture." So apparently this was meant to bring in recruits from Georgia or something.

Then there's the submarine one. To quote my brother again, it sounds like it's some kind of innuendo. But I don't know; the fella looks too smug to be doing any volunteering in the boudoir. The women is obviously paying special attention to his medal; she seems to like small things.

The final poster has to be one of the all-time best examples of ridiculously heavy-handed messages from your government. Anytime the government puts out a poster telling you who your friend is, you know something has gone terribly wrong. And why was this necessary? Were there a lot of Chinese infantrymen showing up to get haircuts or buy groceries in rural New Hampshire in 1944?

For some reason this post really cracked me up. Thank you for a infecting me with a good spell of giggles on a Friday evening.

I've never seen those allied forces posters before, they are as you say hilariously heavy-handed. I do, however, appreciate the clumsy effort (as a Chinese American especially). And it's not just the Englishman's teeth; ya gotta love the Canuck's hat.

Regarding the submarine poster's innuendo: the girl is primordially drawn to shiny objects that signify virile strength, and the smug dude has volunteered for duty in a cylindrical shiny object which plunges mightily through wetness.

Still, by far the funniest of the lot is the hardcore peanut. I mean, how did the artist ever stop rolling with laughter long enough to complete putting that gnarly facial expression on those legs and that body?!

Hi, Kai, thanks for reading. I also found your blog via Slant Truth, and really liked your post on the latest round of blackfacing (can we just program that feature out of future editions of Photoshop?). I'm glad you enjoyed the post, and hope you'll continue reading (there's actually plenty more where these came from).

It may seem funny that they had to show us pictures of our allies so that we would know who they were, but Americans may have been more ignorant of geography than they are today and they were certainly more xenophobic. In fact when the Chinese poster was printed, it was virtually impossible for someone of Chinese extraction to be a US citizen. In fact Chinese Americans who had been here for generations had been deported and stripped of citizenship earlier in the century. The Chinese exclusion act was not repealed until after the war. It must have semed necessary to show people who they should be hating and who they should not be hating.

I would bet that a list of who our friends and allies are today would be much smaller.